We're good to start? Awesome. Well, thanks everyone for joining the room today, and those that are live over the webcast. My name is Jake Roberge. I'm the analyst at William Blair, that covers BlackLine. And just to kick things off as well, for a full list of our research disclosures, please visit williamblair.com. But with that, really happy to have BlackLine here. Co-CEOs, Therese Tucker, Owen Ryan, and then Chief Financial Officer, Mark Partin. We're gonna kick things off with a presentation from Therese. She'll run through a few slides and just set a high-level overview of the business, and then we'll dig deeper in with a little fireside chat. But with that, I'll turn it over to Therese. Thanks, Jake. Thank you everyone for joining us today. I see some familiar faces in the crowd. Thank you for being on this journey with us. For those of you that don't know BlackLine, I'm gonna do a quick overview and it about our mission, our markets, and of course, my favorite, our innovation. Of course, it would not be a proper presentation without a safe harbor slide, so I'm sure you all want to take time and read that. But I am the founder of BlackLine over 20 years ago. Our mission from day one has been to use modern technology to solve real business problems for our customers, okay? And our mission today is slightly broader in terms of, we are focusing on inspiring, powering, and guiding Digital Finance Transformation. This means that when we inspire, we let our customers know what we've learned from having more than 4,000 customers on what the art of the possible is. In terms of powering, our platform has to be able to deliver measurable value to our customers, and to guide, typically, our journeys with our customers are multi-year journeys. So inspire, power, and guide digital finance transformation. We are serving the office of the CFO. Historically, we were sort of focused on the controller's office, and within it, the accounting team has really been the heartbeat of the office of the CFO. Our CFO, Mr. Partin, often likes to say that nobody makes their careers in accounting, but many careers are broken by problems in accounting. So that's where we started our journey, and it's really core to everything that we do. Over the past several years, however, we've innovated and developed some new solutions that have really deepened our capabilities across the office of the controller and beyond. We've built and acquired some solutions that moved us into adjacent areas and really expanded our reach, Invoice- to-C ash, for example. The Intercompany solution touches many different departments: accounting, consolidation, and financial analytics, okay? We've recently done an organic solution around financial reporting, analytics, and consolidation, really focused primarily on the mid-market for now, but expanding over time. We have an extremely large, under-penetrated TAM. I think I heard Mark Partin say this morning that there are 13 million accountants around the world, and still only a fraction of those. We regularly get asked by our investors: Well, what do they do instead? The answer is, sadly, paper and spreadsheets. That is still, in many markets today, the primary approach to some of what our solutions will automate for people. We did this really, thinking about the long-term opportunity. The size of this TAM does not all appear in one day because our buyers tend to be a bit slow-moving at times. Accountants in general, I think it's fair to say, don't love change, but we see the long-term opportunity, and when we operate as a company, we operate with our long-term goals in mind. However, over the past number of years, we've really, just gotten some incredible marquee customers across virtually every vertical that you might want to, really, ask for. Just marquee names, people that are willing to stand up and speak for us. And so we've got more than 2,000 enterprise customers and more than 2,000 mid-market customers. Our solution applies across virtually all industries and all sizes of companies. As part of this journey, we started as a single-solution company. We have subsequently moved to being a multi-solution company, and now over the last several years, we're really moving towards the power of a platform. And specifically, within this last year, we've really spent a great deal of time and effort on having a unified platform that provides a very cohesive experience for our customers. And this is actually very good because what we're seeing a bit in the marketplace is people want more one-stop shopping. So the fact that we've extended our breadth and depth of our solutions has been very appealing to our customer base.... So we continue to move forward, addressing the needs of the office of the CFO, and we want to offer them a unified, comprehensive, and very flexible platform for this office of the CFO. We believe this has got an incredible future in front of it. This platform, okay, this is actually very cool because, and we'll probably talk more about this today. Our core solution has been the Financial Close. We are just starting to get some great traction across our strategic products, and this is all based upon some of the work that we're doing in terms of the ability to orchestrate, visualize, and automate various workflows with the Accounting Studio, okay, and the application of AI. And I will be the last person who loves a technology buzzword. All right? I've spent years in front of investors explaining why blockchain wasn't going to put us out of business, and then explaining why RPA wasn't going to put us out of business. I actually think that AI, in this context and where it's going, has the possibility for being a real game changer in our market, and I want to utilize those advancements to really make sure that BlackLine is the winning solution for decades to come. So this is just a quick overview. I think it's an exciting time to be a part of BlackLine. I hope that you enjoy our presentation today, and we look forward to taking your questions. Thank you. Yeah, well, thanks for kicking it off, Therese. Really appreciate you sharing those few slides. I guess just as we enter more of the fireside chat format, maybe if we could kick things off with you two, Owen and Therese, recently kind of moved into the co-CEO model. So would love to hear what are some of the key changes that you've made since moving back into the co-CEO suite, and what are some of the things you're focused on moving forward? Yeah, I think the first thing we really did, you go back from March of last year, very quickly tried to understand what we had in the company, right? So coming back in from the board, it's a little bit different, so you really turn up, everything upside down and figure out what you've got. And we finished that work really in May of last year, reported that to the board. From May through August, we completely revamped the strategy and made lots of choices through what we call a play-to-win framework, so where we would play. And that deals everything from geographies, to products, to industries, to customer segmentations, to partners. Those were the big five areas that we focused on. Then we were thinking about how we would win. It's one thing to say where we're going to play, how we will win. Then we tried to do a real clear view of what was the gaps between what we needed and what we had, and then what we would measure going forward. And so we did all that over the course of last summer, May through August, presented that to the board in August, got two thumbs up to move forward with that. The reality, though, is when we refreshed the strategy, you then realize, and it ties to what Therese just shared, we had evolved from sort of a single solution to much closer to a platform, and that required us to rethink how we operated the company. So we revamped our operating model and created these product-led growth pillars, if you will, that would allow us to sort of use the organization from a matrix perspective. We're really great at financial close. Our people are super confident in it. They're comfortable. The market knows and recognizes us for that. And we're still very early in those other products. And so, we put those in place. It takes advantage of we're having single leaders that are driving those businesses, if you will, taking full advantage of the organization and helping ours to drive much more success with our customers and our partners to understand the value of those products, how to get them implemented, how to get them optimized, making sure our customer support teams can help with customers as we move forward. So that was the next thing we did, in creating that operating model. Did that through November. We went live, actually, in January, so we're up and running now a little over five months at this particular point in time. It's working very, very well. We're pleased with the progress we're making. We know it's never perfect when you roll out of the box, and so things that we've learned already in the first five months is the industry lens of this has been much more compelling than we had even anticipated. Our customers that are in the same industry segments want to understand what others are doing, and we're now using our information and the data in a way that helps them understand what others are doing. There is good collaboration between these customers because it's not proprietary, right? They can talk about accounting. Our partners tend to be organized by industry, so it allows us to go through, you know, that market with them as well. So it's really been a very, very positive change in the model for us. We truly are a global company. We kind of had to adjust to provide a bit more autonomy to other parts of the world. We can't wait for L.A. to wake up if you're in Asia Pac or Europe, and so we've done some good things around that. And then we've, as you all know, brought in a number of new leaders who we have empowered to drive the success of this company as we move forward. We had a great team that got us to a certain point, but to get to that next point, we recognized we needed another caliber of leader to drive the success of the organization. So that's what we've been up to. Yeah, that's really helpful and really helpful to understand the changes and the tweaks you're making on the go-to-market side. I guess also on the product side, you've expanded the platform's breadth quite a bit with Accounting Studio, Journal Risk Analyzer, just a few products that you've been launching since you all took back over. I'm curious, Therese, which of those products are you most excited about, and how do you see the evolution of the platform moving forward? Well, as I mentioned, I think there's a lot of power in having a platform, a single, unified, comprehensive experience for our customers. So really making that a reality was a big focus of this last year. As part of that, now, the Accounting Studio and the Journal Risk Analyzer are our two latest products. The Accounting Studio was just relaunched. Think about that as workflow orchestration, and you don't live in accounting and finance every day, but I have to tell you that their system landscape is complicated and fragmented and has a lot of old stuff in it that is duct-taped together. Being able to put this into an orchestration layer brings them incredible benefits and incredible risk reduction. That was launched for production for early adopters this last May, just last month, and the reception to that has been very good. We just announced in March our Journal Risk Analyzer, which is our first product that's really focused around AI. And just to give you a quick business snapshot of the problem that we're solving, because, again, none of this has value unless you're solving real business problems for your customers. But auditors today are taking an entire population of manual journals. They used to sample, now they want them all. They're running them through tools to find the ones that are causing anomalies or risk. This Journal Risk Analyzer lets our customers do that before the auditors ever see it. So let's say you had somebody who made a journal for a seven-figure amount out of the Cayman Islands on a Sunday afternoon. Guess what? That might cause a few red flags. You want to see that before your auditors do. Let's say that you have a policy that don't make journals under $250. You want to see those before your auditors do. Where are your policy violations? The ability to start to be able to process very large datasets with artificial intelligence has got a lot of value to our customers. We've already closed the early adopter program because we had too many customers raise their hands. So that's an early adopter right now. Probably next quarter, we'll go to general availability because there's tremendous demand for that. So those are two of the ones that I'm super excited about. I think Intercompany, we've just finally, combined our internal homegrown product with our acquired product out of FourQ, and now going to market this month with our partners with a consolidated Intercompany solution. This is a more complicated sale, but it's a much larger sale. So those are probably the three that are on my radar right now. They're all kind of my favorite children. I can't help it. That's helpful. And then there, those more strategic products, whether it be Intercompany, Invoice- to-C ash, the, the newer products you're releasing are now driving about 25%-30% of bookings. How do you really get customers to understand the value prop? How do you sell those? Is it the, the verticalization that you were talking about, Aaron? Just would love to hear what you're doing on the go-to-market side to drive more traction of those newer products. Yeah, there's really two pieces to it, and you just, you sort of just nailed it. So one, by putting these product-led growth leaders in place, it's sort of an additional piece of security for our sales force, who are, again, very comfortable in the financial close, but not quite as comfortable with some of these new products. And so the sales force can go out, they can engage in conversations with customers, and if there's an interest, then we can bring in the, you know, the person that really knows how to close the deal and bring in the right resources that can also then talk about how to get it implemented and optimized. And so that's a nice combination that's working. The other thing is, we've done a really big revamp with our partner program. So a lot of software companies want hundreds and hundreds of partners. I would tell you that's the biggest waste of time you could have. You're better off with a much smaller group that you're committed to each other. So we cut our partner group in half from 150 last year to 75. Therese and I affectionately have what we call our CEO dozen, that really are driving, you know, 90% of our activity, and they are investing tons of their time to become truly product experts. So, for example, one of the big, system integrators, they've got a team of 60 people based in India. They've taken them off of the HighRadius solution and moved them to the BlackLine Invoice- to-C ash solution. Why? Because they just think that that's a better place for their resources to be. So those partners are invaluable to us because you remember in consulting, you start at zero every year. You've got to go out and sell a whole another book of business. So the more that we can create with them, bring that to market, give them reasons to go talk to the CFOs and controllers, where they have tremendous brand access, is important. They also have much greater access than we do to CIOs because they do so much work in that space, and so they're able to talk about the value of BlackLine, not only for what its solution is. And I think we were smart, maybe a little lucky. We were moving to a platform. It used to be all about best of breed. Now it's moving much more towards one-stop shopping, and the fact that we've got our platform really pretty far down the road does give us a little bit, we believe, a competitive advantage when we're going in and talking to both now a CFO and a CIO about what we're doing. You know, the CIO cares tremendously about cost rationalization, but they also care about cybersecurity. And most of our RFPs today, when we receive them, half of it's about cyber. And the amount of investment that we've made there to make sure our customers are going to be secure is really important to them. And so that's just some of the changes. Yeah, that's helpful. Then if we take a step back, I think one of the more attractive things about selling into the office of the CFO is just how early it is in the digitization efforts. I mean, there's still 75%-80% of companies out there that haven't actually gone through a digital transformation in the CFO's office. So I'm curious, when we think about moving forward, like, what are some of the catalysts that actually get the ball rolling for CFOs to start to modernize? Yeah. Look, I think... And feel free to jump in here as well, Therese and Mark. But I think... Yeah, we spend a lot of time with customers, and, and I, in particular, spend an awful lot of time talking with customers. And, and if I just reflect on the last, you know, few months, you know, going in, seeing customers with a partner often, going through the roadmaps that we have created with our customers and our partners, the journey that- what that's going to look like. Customers have gotten smarter. I mean, the days of, you know, buying a big IT project and then hoping it was going to work are over. They're buying things much more, compartmentalized. They want to make sure it gets implemented, optimized, can demonstrate the success, tell that story, and then go to the next gate, if you will. And so that's certainly a piece of what we're seeing. CFOs know they need to get it done, right? And it's just a question of competing priorities because remember, we sell to a cost center. We don't sell to a profit center, and that's always a little bit harder, as you can imagine. And so sometimes it's just the pressure of, you know, the CFO and his or her team can no longer do it the way they were doing because it just gets overwhelming. The errors start to show up, you know, things break down. There's a couple of examples out recently where companies couldn't file their 10-Ks because they had no accounting staff, and it's just unbelievable. But those are the realities that are beginning to come to bear. So it's a little bit about the timing of, and prioritization of where the budgets are, for what they're looking for, but it's also then these broader Digital Finance Transformation efforts. And you're right, it's very early stages. You can talk to all the big SIs, where they're putting their dollars, where they believe the future is, on these, you know, sort of, I'll call it like a 5- to 10-year journey. And we're well embedded with that as we try to move forward. And so for the medium long term, we like what's happening. We see it, we're part of the solution, but you can't, you can't push open a locked door. I mean, that's the hard part, to be honest. And so... And, and I think, again, for us, it's being able to demonstrate success for our customers, with our partners, and then being able to tell that story that they got a real ROI, so they can share that with their CEO and their board, and that will change the dynamic. Anything you'd add to that, Therese? Yeah. I think AI can be a catalyst as well. We're having customers with budgets dedicated for AI projects this year, and it's sort of hilarious because they don't know what it means. They don't know what to spend it on. So they come to us and say: Do you have anything that we could call AI, that we could buy? And so, it's interesting because, we have some very strong opinions and approaches and tactics and strategies around where we're going with AI. So as I mentioned earlier, the Journal Risk Analyzer is the first in a line of products that will be coming that really utilize some of the work, the $ billions that's been invested in AI to date by a number of the large companies out there. So I believe that'll be a catalyst as well. I think we'd all love to see the macro improve. That's, you know, nobody's loving that right now. People are very cautious. They don't know where the world's going. But it's an interesting time. Yeah, and on that, on that macro environment, we do see the ebb and flow, push and pull. Over the last 10 years, we see that impact the short term. But what's important to remember is that in the office of the CFO, it's still early innings, and we believe that our buyer, risk-averse, change-averse, mission-critical, you know, operations and performance, that that creates a long-term sustainable growth profile for us. And it's, you know, one of the opportunities, as we've talked about, to catalyze that, is to make sure that we can, help them remove the risk of implementing, remove the risk of change. And so we work very closely with that. But also, what high risks, barrier to entry, high barriers to entry create also for us is, high switching costs. You know, we have a very high renewal rate with our customers. We've been with many of them for many of years. We grow with them and serve them. So it's a long-term market. Yeah, that's helpful. And then, given you sell into the CFO's office, what's your relationship with the larger ERP vendors? What are the functional swim lanes between your platform and theirs? And then how has that changed as the macro has worsened and customers consider your solutions versus an ERP-native solution? Yeah, I, I'll start and then... So with SAP specifically, we have a very deep and growing, fruitful, productive relationship, and that just continues to get better. A lot of it comes from the work we do, thinking about product roadmaps together. I'm sure if you listen to, you know, Christian from, SAP, they've got three big strategic priorities: artificial intelligence, the office of the CFO, and cloud. That all lines up very, very well with what we're trying to do. There's great transparency, trust, confidence in each other that just gets stronger with, with each and every passing day. We've got a team down, as for example, at Sapphire this week on stage. Beauty of it is, we're supposed to do one session for a couple of hundred people. As I understand it, we wound up having to do four because the demand was so high to be in that session around financial it's a combination of their group reporting with our Financial Reporting Analytics. Just really very, very well received. In fact, we had to turn customers and prospects away, the demand was so high. So you see a lot of good stuff there. We're continuing to drive a lot of success with them in the marketplace. Obviously, you all know they had a layoff in the first quarter. That was a little bit disruptive for us as much as it was for them because relationships change and things got slowed down. But we'd like to believe and are starting to see that that's getting itself back stabilized. Oracle is an example. It's an interesting relationship. We do a lot of work with and through them, but they also have a solution that sometimes they want to pitch, and so we just have to deal with that reality. Workday, we have a, you know, relationship with. But I think we tried, you know, when Therese built the company, it was about being ERP-agnostic, and so many companies have more than one ERP, so we have to be able to work with all of them. And this is where you really can tell the story better, better than I can about how, how you built that. Yeah. Well, you know, unless it's a very small company, the second you do an acquisition, you have a second ERP. All right? And that could be for a short term, like a year or more. But the ERPs historically have not wanted to build bridges to other ERPs. So BlackLine has been this great sort of place of neutrality, a Switzerland, if you will, to bring information in and become that central source, single source of truth across many different systems within the office of the CFO. So it works very, very well, for us to be able to work with all of the different ERPs, and we will continue to do that. The SolEx relationship, we think that, you know, if we're going to have anybody resell our products for us, I think SAP is an excellent one. And we've seen them help build out markets like Japan and other places, and there's still very much untapped markets with SAP. They now use BlackLine themselves and have done some really great promotional videos along that line. That's helpful. Then maybe you've made a couple comments around the macro, but if we could just double-click into that in terms of what you are seeing on the macro front, just how it's impacted you over the last few years and how it's trended over the past few quarters. Yeah, look, I don't, there's nobody that's doing anything in Financial Close or Invoice-to-Cash or Intercompany without talking to us, right? So we're always, you know, on the shortlist, unless it's a very odd situation. And what we've seen is the total swings at the plate have just come down, and that's just the reality. And again, we go out and talk to customers about this, and we're a very customer-centric organization. We hear what's on their mind, we understand how they're trying to think about things. And so for us, even though the swings at the plate might not happen where we want them in the quarter, you can see them getting in the on-deck circle, if you will. And so that's what's encouraging for us. But I think to Therese's point, you know, there's a little bit of geopolitical risk out there. People are not sure what's going to, you know, come over the next year or so, and so I think there's a little bit more caution. That probably started to emerge what market? The end of 2022-ish. Mm. Felt it in 2023. We certainly are feeling it still in 2024. But for us, you know, again, now, you know, while there may be fewer swings at the plate, that just means we need to win more. And the execution we're trying to drive around closing sales is laser-like focused. Yeah, that's helpful. And then, Mark, maybe I'll bring you into the conversation here with the... Kinda you've put out some longer-term targets around growth and profitability. Yeah. I know 20%+, that was a different macro environment, but maybe just help us think through what are some of the building blocks that get us back to potentially re-accelerating growth at some point? Yeah, thanks. Our targets are to have a balanced growth and profitability. 20 and 20 is where we set that out at the end of 2022. Now, where we are today, macro-driven, is below that. The growth algorithm for us is to first remember it's early and it's a very large market. We have a leadership position, and we've reinforced a lot of the skill set and assets to be able to execute in any market. We think financial close is a mid-teens grower. That's new logo and expansion on our own base. And then we have a strategic product portfolio that we've acquired or innovated on that we believe can be the accelerator to get us to 20%. One example of that is, we've got a $600 million ARR business today with 4,000+ customers. We think we're a third to a half penetrated. So we've quantified our own white space and our existing customers to be close to $1 billion. That's expansion and more users, that's price increases, and that's obviously, the strategic portfolio of products. And so our growth begins with selling into our own base through our own direct sales force, our partners, and a number of other, initiatives that we've put into the business lately. And so, our way back to 20 is to continue to do and focus on, driving these products into a platform, elevate our message to the office of the CFO above the controller, make sure that we're, speaking the language of CIOs and CFOs, which are important moving forward, and continue to innovate in our own platform. Yeah, that's helpful. And then you've done a nice job expanding the profitability profile over the last few years. Just, I know there was a rift along the way, but maybe talk about some of the other areas of leverage that you've seen in the model and how investors should think about the leverage moving forward. Sure. Our target model for operating margin is 20%. Today, we're operating close to 18 or 19 in this year. We're doing that primarily through high gross margin, high recurring revenue. We've got 95% of our revenue as recurring, and we've got 80%+ gross margin. And we're putting into sales and marketing what we think is a low 30s at this growth rate. We can expand that a little bit as we start to see the demand coming back from a macro environment. And then, you know, we've got the ability, I think, to drive beyond 20% through some of the partnerships. We have a new leadership team today that I'm working with both on the technology side and on the sales and marketing and go-to-market side. These are great, experienced leaders that are already looking for ways over the next 3-5 years to drive automation, to drive offshoring, ways that we can really continue to deliver for our customers, keep our foot on the innovation, but find those areas and those angles to drive greater than 20% margin. Yeah, that's helpful. I know we're getting close to time here, but maybe just one last one over to you, Owen, on the partner side. You've made a lot of investments on the tech partnership with SAP, the GSI channel, and some of those you're talking about the priority dozen that you focus on. So maybe talk about some of those investments that you plan on making moving forward. Yeah, I think, listen, and it's a mutual investment, right? Because they're just as committed. One of the things I love about what we're doing with our partners, particularly as we think about some of the opportunities from an industry perspective, and one of my favorite stories is one of our partners really coming in and helping us thinking about our solution from a banking perspective. These are very unique things, like, you know, that go through a high volume of transactions, some of the other things that are associated with it. And so our partners are doing a great job now of coming to us and helping us think about how to evolve our roadmap, not just for a particular company, but for industry segments where they understand the issues pretty well. So the investments we've made with our partners and continuing to make is better training for them, certification, so that they're qualified to go out and serve and implement the product. We're doing more joint marketing events, and you'll see that they'll be different in the sense that they'll... They're able to, you know, work with us to bring the right kind of people in the room to have the right kind of conversations at the right time. And so we're doing much more around that. We've done a bit more around learning. We've done more now trying to... We don't compete with our partners for opportunities to do implementations, we coordinate with them. They bring certain aspects of expertise that BlackLine doesn't have, and we have aspects of expertise that they don't have. Instead of seeing it as a zero-sum game, we see it more as a hand in glove of what we can do together in the marketplace. We've put some protocols in place so our partners can trust us, right? We had a little bit of the Wild Wild West for a while, where our salespeople would introduce his or her favorite partner to a customer without regard to the fact that other partners may be there already. The first thing we're trying to do is make sure there is a partner that's there and use them versus trying to introduce a new agent into the situation. Our partners are loving that. They love the fact that we have sort of really focused on them, and in exchange, we're getting that focus back. One of the most important things for me is... And you know, this is reality, right? So one of our partners, their practice last year for SAP implementations was $7 billion. BlackLine was $100 million. So you can sort of just see relative magnitude of order, but that $100 million goes a long way, actually, to helping them with the $7 billion, because we've become a differentiator when, for example, that partner, and SAP, and we work together, the win rate's over 75%. So that's why they want it. But what we've done is also now made sure we get to the top of the house of these partners and have access and visibility and a reporting cadence so that we're there all the time, trying to make sure that we're honoring each other's commitments and holding one another accountable. It's very clear of what they can expect and what we expect in return. Yeah, very helpful. Well, thanks, Therese. Thanks, Owen. Thanks, Mark. Appreciate the time today.